Video Game Players Are Being Robbed of Choice - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Summary

Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast
Episode: Video Game Players Are Being Robbed of Choice
Release Date: July 24, 2025
Hosts: Tim Gettys, Greg “GameOverGreggy” Miller, Blessing Adeoye, and Andy Cortez
Guest: Zolivier Nelson Jr., Studio Head at Strange Scaffold

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1. Introduction and Guest Background

The episode welcomes Zolivier Nelson Jr. from Strange Scaffold, introducing him as a seasoned game developer with over 100 titles under his belt. Greg Miller expresses his admiration, stating, “I’ve always admired you from afar” (02:03).

2. Strange Scaffold’s Mission and Philosophy

Zolivier delves into Strange Scaffold’s core mission, emphasizing transparency in game development. He explains, “Games just present me with a product in isolation, and it changes the way we talk and think about games” (09:02). The studio aims to provide context around game creation, highlighting the creative journeys and fostering a deeper connection between developers and players.

3. Recent and Upcoming Projects

Zolivier provides an overview of Strange Scaffold’s prolific output over the past two years, releasing seven games:

• Life Eater (05:17): A horror fantasy kidnapping simulator that explores genre fusion and development challenges.
• Clickolding (09:02): An unsettling first-person clicker with sensual themes, funded by Outer Sloth and contributing to Zolivier’s personal life events.
• I Am Your Beast (15:10): A fast-paced revenge thriller FPS with kinetic text cutscenes, which garnered positive feedback and influenced other developers.
• River Heights Mall Gene Splicer 3000 (20:00): A collaboration with Meow Wolf, combining creature creation with physics-enabled breakout mechanics.
• Teens Mutant Ninja Turtles Tactical Takedown (33:41): A turn-based beat 'em up exploring unique narrative avenues within the TMNT universe.
• Co Op Kaiju Horror Cooking (58:43): An absurd multiplayer horror game about medieval monks cooking for Kaijus to prevent the apocalypse, currently in open playtest phase and releasing on July 29th.

4. Transparency and Player Engagement

Strange Scaffold prioritizes involving players in the development process. Zolivier states, “We let players into that process. You get to watch those decisions happen in real time” (15:10). This approach aims to demystify game development, allowing players to understand the intricate decision-making that shapes their favorite games.

5. Challenges in the Gaming Industry

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the systemic issues within the gaming industry, particularly the mismatch between project scopes and financial structures. Zolivier criticizes the pressure to inflate budgets and timelines, arguing, “Developers were literally told... 'make a $3 million game'... and then having the rug pulled out” (65:13). He emphasizes that such practices limit creative freedom and rob players of diverse game choices.

6. Success Stories and Collaborations

Zolivier highlights successful collaborations and studios that align with Strange Scaffold’s philosophy:

• Landfall Games: Praised for their open approach and adherence to their creative vision.
• Frosty Pop: A key supporter that helped Strange Scaffold survive funding challenges.
• New Blood: Noted for their perfectionism and community-focused development process.

These partnerships exemplify how aligning business structures with creative goals can lead to sustainable and innovative game development.

7. Future Vision for Game Development

Looking ahead, Zolivier envisions a shift towards studios that prioritize sustainable practices and creative autonomy. He shares, “What we need to be talking about... is making sure that what you say you want to make for players matches what you're actually building” (62:07). Strange Scaffold aims to continue producing unique games while fostering an ecosystem that supports both developers and players.

8. Conclusion and Call to Action

The episode wraps up with Zolivier encouraging listeners to support Strange Scaffold through their Patreon, where they offer exclusive content like design documents and production insights. He urges players to engage with their games and provide feedback, reinforcing the studio’s commitment to transparency and community involvement (86:40).

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Notable Quotes

• Greg Miller (02:03): “I am incredibly honored to have you...”
• Zolivier Nelson Jr. (09:02): “Games just present me with a product in isolation, and it changes the way we talk and think about games.”
• Zolivier Nelson Jr. (15:10): “We let players into that process. You get to watch those decisions happen in real time.”
• Zolivier Nelson Jr. (65:13): “Developers were literally told... 'make a $3 million game'... and then having the rug pulled out.”
• Zolivier Nelson Jr. (62:07): “What we need to be talking about... is making sure that what you say you want to make for players matches what you're actually building.”
• Zolivier Nelson Jr. (86:40): “Best thing you can do to help Strange Scaffold is... patreon.com/StrangeScaffold.”

Key Insights

• Transparency Enhances Connection: By sharing the development process openly, Strange Scaffold builds a stronger bond with players, fostering trust and engagement.
• Sustainable Practices are Crucial: Aligning project scopes with financial structures ensures long-term viability and creative freedom for developers.
• Diverse Game Offerings Benefit Players: Avoiding the push for inflated budgets allows studios to experiment with unique genres and concepts, enriching the gaming landscape.
• Community Support Matters: Platforms like Patreon play a vital role in supporting independent studios, enabling them to maintain autonomy and continue producing innovative games.

Conclusions

Zolivier Nelson Jr.’s conversation underscores the importance of rethinking traditional game development models. By prioritizing transparency, sustainable practices, and creative autonomy, Strange Scaffold exemplifies a path forward that benefits both developers and players. The studio’s commitment to involving players in the development journey not only enhances the gaming experience but also advocates for systemic changes in the industry to foster diversity and innovation.

For those interested in supporting and following Strange Scaffold’s journey, visit their Patreon and stay updated with their latest projects slated for release in the near future.

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Note: Timestamps reference the transcript provided and correspond to key points within the discussion.

Transcript

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Foreign.

[Greg Miller]

What's up, everybody? Welcome to the Kind of Funny Games cast. Damn, I screwed up the intro.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Wow.

[Greg Miller]

When's the last time I heard that? We're playing an away game over here. I don't know what's going on.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

I thought you're a professional. I thought you've been doing this for decades.

[Greg Miller]

Welcome to the Kind of Funny Games cast for Thursday, July 24, 2025.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Wow.

[Greg Miller]

20, 2015.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Wow.

[Greg Miller]

What is it?

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Get it together.

[Greg Miller]

Kevin freaks me out by showing me this thing over here. How bad the studio's doing. Right before we go. Thank you. I turned it off, Kevin. I don't need to see how bad it's going. Of course. I'm one of your hosts, Greg Miller, alongside Forbes. 30 under 30, aka New York Game Awards nominated. Aka Leftover Poppy Blessing Adioye Jr. For.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

A second, I thought you were introing Zollerie Nelson. I was like, man, because I'm Xavier.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

You're. Are you Forbes? Yeah.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

I feel we have a lot of.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Wait, hold on.

[Greg Miller]

Are you New York Game Awards nominated? Well, something's wrong. Something else is going on. Something else is going on.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Kevin saying Gazelle Audio isn't coming in.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Yeah, give me two seconds.

[Greg Miller]

This is how you treat a BAFTA nom. This is how you treat a New York game or you New York game?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

There we go.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

We're good.

[Greg Miller]

You were New York Game Awards nominated to God.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

We. We were. We're playing through those levels in Split Fiction where, like, we're living the exact same life, but just like Swiss Delays, so we can.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

You're the version of me that went, like, strictly into game development and I continued on with games journalism, even though I'm not a games journalist. I don't know why I said games journalism.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Now.

[Greg Miller]

You are Game Awards nominated.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

You're right. Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

Do you want to restart the whole show? We're having a day at Kind of funny if you didn't know Everybody, of course, the studio in meltdown. But Kevin has given us this lifeboat. Thank you, Kevin, for making sure the shows could happen today. And of course, thank you to our guest, Zolivair Nelson Jr. From Strange Scaffold for hanging on. You are hours behind when I told you you'd be on the show, but you made it happen. We appreciate that, sir. How are you?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

I'm doing well today. Thank you so much for having me.

[Greg Miller]

I am incredibly honored to have you. Of course, I know you've talked to Blessing before. You've done shows with him. You've been interviewed by him before. I've never had the chance to sit down and talk with you and I've always admired you from afar. And then what? Last week or two weeks ago you gave a presentation to a bunch of games journal types which I tossed myself into. And I thought it was so good I immediately hit up your pr. I was like, can he just come do that on the show with us? And you were nice enough to say yes. So thank you for that.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Oh again, the honor is mutual. I tend to see you walking very fast through locations talking to cool people and I'm just like, it's just the Doppler effect of Greg just going like woo.

[Greg Miller]

It's like, well you are one of those cool people and I'm excited to.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Be so I'm glad to finally, I'm glad to finally talk to you. It's a pleasure.

[Greg Miller]

Well, we'll get right into it because this is the Kinda Funny Gamescast. Each and every weekday on a variety of platforms, we talk to you about the biggest topics in video games, whether they be reviews, previews, interviews or cool slideshow presentations. That's what we do here on the Gamescast each and every day. YouTube.com kindafunnygames Twitch TV, kindafunnygames Podcast services around and I'm just like you bless. Yeah, I watch games daily, but like can I hit the table or is something else gonna break?

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

I'm so scared. We're like hanging on by a thread today.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

The world.

[Greg Miller]

Of course if you love what we do here, the cool people we bring in, we'd love you to support us. You can pick up a Kinda Funny membership over on patreon.com kindafunny YouTube.com kind to funnygames, Apple and Spotify to get all of our shows ad free of course get your daily dose of me, Greg Miller and a 15 to 20 minute podcast I call Greg Way. And of course get good karma for supporting an independent small business. No bucks to us or way no big deal. Like subscribe, share, ring the bell, follow notifications, et cetera, et cetera, use your Amazon prime to get that free Twitch prime and give it to us no matter how you support. Thank you so much. If you're watching live like art by shayis or ronq21r remember you can go to YouTube.com kindafunnygames and super chat there to have your questions read here to find out what's going on to talk about this. And you already got one. There it is. Sendnuggies Live in the chat goes loving co op, Kaiju horror cooking Dumb Fun with friends. Congrats on everything.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Heart.

[Greg Miller]

And that's something Xalavier we'll have to talk about because you there's a little bit of everything which is the whole presentation. We'll get to it in a second. Like I said, of course this is kind of funny. We're an 11 person small business, all about live talk shows. Kinda funny. Games Daily was about Sony, of course, buying a stake in the Elden Ring publisher Bandai Namco. After this, you're getting some killing Floor three with the boys. And of course, if you're a kinda funny member. Today's Greg Way is all about keeping my wrists strong. I got strong wrists.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

How did you even discover that you have strong wrists?

[Greg Miller]

I didn't think much about it and then someone wrote in asking about wrist health and here I am.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

Do you work out your wrists every night?

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Oh God. All right, cool, we're here.

[Greg Miller]

Thank you. Our Patreon producers, Carl Jacobs, Omega Buster and Delaney the Som Twining. Today we're brought to you by Factor and Mood, but we'll tell you about that later. For now, let's begin with what is and forever will be topic of the show. And the topic is quite simple, right. Zalavir Nelson Jr. Is changing the video game industry. No pressure. Do you feel like you're changing the video game industry?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

I don't think I'm changing the games industry, but I think I'm being loud and consistent in a time where being loud, frequent and consistent is very uncommon just because of how the dynamics have changed. When I grew up playing games, you would have games from your favorite developers and from your favorite teams coming out every year, every two years. If you look at FromSoftware's history, they were launching like two games a year up until the 2010s and the shift in what games is capable of, but also some of the bad habits it's enabled. Some of the ways it has allowed the worst sins of how the industry relates to both its players and its developers to kind of fester as long as the products come out is, is something that doesn't get challenged because every few years, every half decade or decade, you will have something big enough to draw your attention from it. And so one thing I'm very grateful of for Strange Scaffold and one thing that motivates us to kind of keep at this pace is again, I don't think we're changing gaming, but we are sort of by doing what we do and doing it so often, it does raise just that little point of question of like, wait, do we have to keep working this way? And if we keep asking those questions, I do think that that itself will lead to a change and that will come from our players. And that's why so much of what we're doing now is about changing how we talk to players.

[Greg Miller]

So refreshing.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

I got like a dual pronged question here. Right? Cause you mentioned what it is that you do. I do want to ask what is it that Strange Scaffold does that separates y' all from everybody else?

[Greg Miller]

But then also, and I also want.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

To call it because that's.

[Greg Miller]

I wanted to give the who you are thing. But then also I don't know how to get to the presentation. So if you think the presentation covers who you are, if somebody doesn't know who you are, doesn't know Strange Scaffold doesn't know El Paso.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

I will say I did do the thing where I looked over Xalavir's social media accounts because we were talking before the show about video game opinions that each of us have. And I do have a Tweet here from March 25, 2022 that says it's from far back. Oh yeah, this is from Zaliver Nelson on Twitter who says, I have worked on over 60 games, ran a column in PC Gamer magazine for two years, Bafta nominated, and some guy just walked up to me and said, are you you the Denny's guy? And I feel like that might be a good jumping off point to who is Oliver Nelson?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

For those who don't know me, that count has risen to, I've worked on, I think over a hundred, if not 110 games.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Oh wow.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

In the last nine years of my time in game development and those titles range from AAA to indie licensed to original. And in that time, being able to interact with so much of the industry from so many different levels, being a lead on triple A teams all the way down to, you know, writing barks for both Indy and AAA crews. I've just really gotten to see a comprehensive view of what it means to make, develop, market and publish a game in the modern day games industry. And I mean, even this week, I got to announce yesterday that I'm the voice of the main character of the new Hellraiser game.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Which is, yeah, congratulations on that.

[Greg Miller]

As if you weren't busy enough.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

It's just a few several hour sessions where I screamed so, so loud. It's fine. But yeah, like the. If there's anything that someone would use to sort of know who I am, I would say that it's. I've been a little bit of everywhere and that that is why I speak. And I'm going to talk in a moment so vigorously about context. Games, especially from the outside looking in, does so much to bury the context of the processes and decisions that bring you your favorite games. And the more you are familiar with them, the more at least I experience a journey of being shocked and craving the types of stories I realize that every other medium gives me. In film, I can know that Viggo Mortensen broke his toe kicking that helmet in the Lord of the Rings.

[Greg Miller]

Damn helmet.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

I can know that Taylor Swift wrote this song about this guy. And I can vicariously experience everyone puzzle crafting and figure out what she's talking about in each one of her songs. But Games just presents me with a product in isolation, and it changes the way we talk and think about games. And that is where I come from and come in saying, from my unique and privileged position to have worked on so many things, but to still be independent, I want to provide context. I want to talk about creative journeys, and I want to really bring some radical transparency to an industry that desperately needs it.

[Greg Miller]

Oh, yes. And that's what was so, I thought, refreshing about the presentation, let alone the pedigree you've made for a strange scaffold. So do we want to jump into the presentation and get that going?

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Well, I still want to know what's up with the Denny's situation.

[Greg Miller]

Are you. Are you the Denny.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Are you the Denny's guy?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

I gave the. One of the. I think it was one of the, if not the last talk at GDC in 2022, and someone at the very beginning of the presentation, this is a GDC talk. People paid thousands of dollars to sit in this room, shouted, it's the Denny's guy. And the entire room erupted. So for a period of time, that tells you just how much I was associated with Denny's. A Denny's that's now been closed down. The last Denny's in San Francisco is extinct, which means I've been freed.

[Greg Miller]

I still don't understand why you're the Denny's guy. No, I don't understand this reference.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Yeah, when you go to Denny when you've never gone to Denny's before, and then you go to Denny's in very quick succession to the point that people make it a bit to send you, like, their Google coordinates and trick you into going to Denny's again. You become the Denny's guy.

[Greg Miller]

Oh, okay.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

All right. All right.

[Greg Miller]

Sounds like A touchy subject. Sounds like it's actually kind of painful.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

I'm going to show you my. Maybe the favorite thing I have and it is.

[Greg Miller]

Okay.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Headphones coming off.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Fellow game developer gave me this last year and it is the picture from the Shining, but it's me there and it says Denny.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Oh my God.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

I've always been there, actually.

[Greg Miller]

That's amazing.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

I love that.

[Greg Miller]

That's incredible. When's the last time you went to Dallas? Denny's headphones.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

And I don't think I will recover from the food I was forced to eat. Therapist for a period of time.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

He's coming through, right?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Man, that was the only late night spot that was open for a bit.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

You just had to go.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah, yeah. Because even the. Because last was the last one there on Metron, right?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

Across from the corner there. Yeah. So. And is mel's no longer 24 hours? I forget.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

I think Mel's for them is no longer 24 hours. So it was just night after night. Especially pretty early post. Lockdown is like, hey, if it's past 8pm you're going to Denny's. I ended up going to Denny's like four or five times in a. In a three day period, which is too many times to go to Denny's in that. That short of amount of time.

[Greg Miller]

Yeah, That's a lot of Denny's. That's a lot of Denny's. Okay, let's jump into your presentation. Of course, we're doing this in an interesting way. You know when you gave the presentation to me and the other journotypes, it was on Discord and you ran it. We wanted to have the best quality. So Kevin is running it for you. So you need to tell Kevin when to change the slides. Yes. Kevin's throwing up the thumbs up. Yeah, he's good.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Can I interrupt with a question? Are we allowed to ask questions during the presentation? Okay, perfect.

[Greg Miller]

See, that wasn't allowed during our. That wasn't allowed during our presentation. Oh, something happened. They're saying there's no audio. They lost audio. Audio is muted.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

All right. Kevin's figuring out the audio. Also, I want to say this is good quality in this slideshow so far.

[Greg Miller]

I told you.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Yeah, I've not had access to PowerPoint in maybe a couple of decades. And so I don't. I've not seen what like slideshow technology has evolved into. And this is really good. Good quality.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

We're good now.

[Greg Miller]

Okay, so go back to slide one. Hold on. They didn't hear your intro.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Okay.

[Greg Miller]

I Told you it was a weird show.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

So hello, I'm Zolivir. Among all the other things I do, the thing that I do most often is I am the studio head over at Strange Scaffold. We've put out a lot of games that you may or may not be familiar with over the years, including Space Warlord, Organ Training Simulator, El Paso, Elsewhere, and more. Next slide please. Kevin. And what we just kicked off July 16th is the summer of Strange Scaffold and Kind of Funny exclusive. I'll be answering questions throughout the presentation, but basically, there we go. The purpose of this event is to create context, so I'm going to provide. I'm going to begin by providing some Our next project is Co Op Kaiju Horror Cooking. It's an absurd online multiplayer game where a group of monks on a little island at the edge of the world have to cook for giant monsters every year to prevent the apocalypse. When it comes out July 29th, Tuesday of next week, it will be the 18th game we have released in the last six years. It will be the.

[Greg Miller]

You're insane.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Yeah, I work with very talented people and we make very careful decisions. It will be the seventh game we released in the last two years alone and on July 16th. The reason people were able to say at the start of this cast, hey, I've been enjoying Co Op Country Horror cooking is because we in the final weeks of game development, when you're making those frantic decisions and setting priorities to figure out how you make this game come out on time in a stable and as high quality of a way as you can make it, we let players into that process. We literally just said, hey, this is the literal build of the game that is getting updated every day as the developers make those decisions. You get to watch those decisions happen in real time. You get to play the entire game for free as it's happening. And that is an existentially terrifying and nerve wracking experience. But it's a part of something that will continue in the minimum two months of post launch support that we're going to provide for the game afterwards and what we're doing across the entire train scaffold portfolio in general. This month of Strain, this Summer of Strange scaffold, this month of announcements and reveals and discussions is about establishing context. Everything that we do and everything that we have done and everything that we hope to continue to do for a long time to come as being part of a wider creative journey. And this is what I was kind of touching on earlier as being one of the great sins of gaming Something that really only investors, platforms and publishers benefit from, which is when you see a huge amount of layoffs occur or a studio get closed, that gets to just be a number for you. You don't know, like the Viggo Mortensen story. Oh, that's the artist that did that funny poster that you. That made you chuckle during a bad time in your life when you were just running through an FPS level that otherwise, you know, you were in a chase sequence, you happened to look over and see something. That was the artist who made that moment that made your day brighter. This is the writer who wrote your favorite side NPC conversation. This is the programmer who put in. There's one programmer and engineer I'm thinking about in particular. His signature is every game he works on. He makes all of the missiles kind of do a cool little corkscrew like an anime as they go towards a target. And he puts that in on every game. And people, most people will never know his name. They'll never know that signature. But every single one of his games that he's worked on and been in a especially a higher engineering capacity on, he puts that in there for you. And if he gets laid off, those signatures disappear and you never. You feel the loss, but you'll never see it. And so as we're about to run into in the rest of this presentation, we're talking about our games literal weeks after they begin production. Now Truck Kuhn is supporting me from another world. One of the games you're about to see began production two weeks ago. Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator began development a month ago. You're going to see mood boards instead of screenshots. You're going to see very temp imagery. Because games, by obfuscating this information has created a relationship with their audience that is simply about the products. You don't get to delight in the decisions. Respectfully and disrespectfully disagree with the perspectives of what was engaged. You just have a blank sphere upon which you're supposed to project your cares, your hopes. And it gives you no information as to even find the next game that you will love and where the creators that have made the decisions that you connect with are going and have gone next or how they might have been mistreated by the medium that we both care for so much. So as we dig into this, as we go further, that's what Summer of Strange Scaffold is about. It's about being honest about mistakes made and lessons learned. And really, at least as far as our studio goes, trying to change that relationship to not just having the way we talk about games be a series of press beats and some trailers and something fun for the kind of funny crew to talk about the beginning of the day, it is watching projects actually evolve as the people make them to bring you hopefully the next game you love. And if you don't love it, you'll understand why or how or still connect with those people's voices to find future things that will bring you the joy you deserve.

[Greg Miller]

So hold on. Before you go next slide, let me jump in right here. So then if you're gonna get to this, feel free to tell me. No questions till I ask after. But when you're talking about co op Kaiju horror cooking being out right now and it's changing and people see it and seeing the signatures, then of course, Truck Kun, Warlord Baby Simulator, are we. If you're participating in these games and doing the things. Are you seeing the creators talk about what they created? Like, you know what I mean? Like, you're talking about the missile turn. But if I'm jumping into Kaiju right now and seeing the changes, are the changes coming with notes? They're like, oh, this is why and this is who did it, and da.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Da, da da in some cases. So we're. Because there's so little precedent to work upon for doing this. We're still figuring out how and where we do it. But, like, we started as part of this time. This isn't just a marketing event. We're doing this thing, this video series that we're calling developers down the line where it's just a group of people who worked on these games talking about the experience of how the game came together, how specific touches went in. And it's not just the leads either. It is, I think in the very first episode we released, which was Life Eater, one of our background artists talked about decisions that went to the background because it was decisions and it was expertise. But when you're doing a. When you're watching a polished documentary or seeing an expose of how a game went wrong, all that information gets lost. So with co op Kaiju horror cooking, we're again trying to make content not just about buy the game. It's fun and janky and cool. We're trying to make content around. And here's a decision that we made, and here's why we made it, and here's why we tried this thing that you would think works, but didn't. Being open about all that is something that Strange Scaffold has been moving towards. Sometimes Intentionally, sometimes unintentionally over the years. And it's now coalesced into a actual vision of things, something we're intentionally pursuing and doing with our whole chess question.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

For me, the, the being open about the entire process, like do you see this as something that is more beneficial to the audience? Is it more beneficial to you guys? A straight scaffold. Is this something that you see is beneficial to the games industry overall as far as like the, you know, developers who just make games in general, like Indie Triple A? Where do you see this as like how it benefits, like the demographics of folks involved?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

I think it does help developers a lot. You get to see their humanity. I think it does help with the projects themselves and the marketing in terms of making these more than objects that we evaluate and say, Was this worth five bucks? Was this worth 70 bucks? But I think the greatest point that if this ends up becoming more common things in the games industry that my hope and the thing that I've at least personally observed in my life and the lives of other people who have become acquainted with more of the game development process is it will make players lives meaningfully better. Ever since blast processing where it was like, what's blast processing? Don't think about it. It's just going to make the games run better and cooler than that super Nintendo down that that your neighbor has down the street. There is this notable lack of the whole second story of games. And when I watch a movie, I have very easy, casual information I can run across that can for a flawed movie, make it so much more of a rich experience. For a great movie, make it even better. Or give me a caveat, an asterisk and understand part of what made it come together. Games doesn't have that. There's this whole second half of what it means to experience media that games notably is maybe the one medium that it doesn't provide that. So as a player coming to know more game developers, no more game development processes. I played 50 cent blood on the sand and you did I when I was on this, I was playing with all the systems and I was doing executions and I was listening to in the club and it was great. And when I was on the stairs and hit a button, I was transported to an alternate dimension. A domain expansion occurred where 50 cent on flat ground did the execution move on an enemy. Because I'm a game developer, that moment was just not an absurd break into the action. I was like, oh, that was a problem solved. And they did it in a specific and stylish way so that when you're on uneven ground or your camera would clip and obscure the execution, the game auto calculated that and pulled you into an alternate little room with special graphics where that execution could still play out. And if I wasn't a game developer, that entire second set of information of why this was cool and why this was important would be lost to me. And I want everyone to have that for all of their games all the time.

[Greg Miller]

Why do you think our industry is like this? Why aren't more people talking about games two weeks from announced when they just have a mood board?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

It's difficult, it's messy. It is much. I mean, if we keep using other industries as an example, you see and hear the stories of Like Rumors, classic album by Fleetwood Mac. It's songs and who sings them become more rich when you know this is the song, this was the album being made while the band was falling apart and constantly sleeping with each other in different configurations. And that is. But that is also a messier story to tell and it is a subjective one. Games avoids that problem, but then also loses all of the richness and the storytelling and the understanding that you get from the piece of work. Otherwise, again, we usually get like documentaries that are polished and present sometimes, you know, failures, but also. But mainly successes. Here's how this thing came together. Here's the brilliance of Todd Howard. And Todd Howard is a brilliant and terrifying man. He's the only person I have met who had a charismatic aura around him. If he had told me to jump off a bridge, he's the one person I, I would. Because I. I don't have some obsession with Todd Howard. But I met him and I was like, oh, you're like the guy. You walk into a room and you're. And you are the shortest king.

[Greg Miller]

And.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

The idea that you have the exposes and the documentaries, but you don't have the in between bits. You don't have the rumor stories that make game development, sure, messier, but also more brilliant. I think that's part of why. And it again is utilized in more malicious ways as well by big companies to kind of scrub away. Ah, yeah, all these people got laid off. Five game studios got closed down. But don't worry about it. It doesn't impact anything. And when you realize human impact and human stories, you suddenly as a player have a grounding to get angry and to call for targeted change, which is the last thing that a publisher wants when they're just trying to reveal their Q3 slate. Sure.

[Greg Miller]

When they were waiting for the next marketing beat to get you excited for their next trailer.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Yeah.

[Greg Miller]

I want to see your next slide, but before then I'll remind you of course that this is the Kinda Funny gamescast. Each and every weekday we run you through the biggest topics in gaming we need to talk about, whether they be reviews, previews or conversations we need to have. If you'd like that, pick up your membership patreon.com kinda funny YouTube.com kinda funny games, apple or Spotify to get all of our episodes ad free and get a daily dose of me in my 15 to 20 minute podcast called Greg White. But right now you're not using your benefits. So here's a word from our sponsors.

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[Greg Miller]

And we're back with Xolevir Nelson Jr. From Strange Scaffold. We'll let you get back to your presentation now. Sorry we derailed you on slide two.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

No, I mean like this is the purpose of slide two and you saw that in the presentation I gave for press. By the way, people usually never get exposed to these slides. So you're seeing the literal actual slides I showed in the press only preview event. That is the same generic background we use for everything including our game pitches to try to get the studio funding. So transparency even there. But let's move to the next slide. Kevin, thank you. Before I go into what Strange Scaffold is doing now and what they will be doing in the future, let's talk a little bit about just the last two years. Because seven released games, not games we've worked on, not things we've done, just releases is objectively wild. Next slide please. First off, we have at the beginning of 2024 Life Eater, a horror fantasy kidnapping sim about Druid living in modern day suburb who has to kidnap and sacrifice his neighbors to delay the end of the world on the behalf of a God that he isn't sure exists. I thought because the we were pulling from like schedule games and a little bit from imsims and from puzzles. I thought oh yeah, this is just a fusion of genres. Turns out this is a different genre. When you were added enough things together it becomes a different genre. And being completely transparent, that made the end of this dev cycle as we kept having to change things to make a fundamental development cycle work because we weren't making the type of game that we thought we were. We weren't actually working in already explored genre space or significantly explored genre space. So we had to find new solutions. That was a huge revelation on that project and it has continued to root itself in my creative process of don't invent a genre by accident. You ding dong clickolding was the game we made after that middle of 2024. It is an unsettling first person clicker about a masked man sitting in the corner of your hotel room who wants you to click something and he wants to watch you click it. It has obviously weird sensual themes. It was. It has weird sensual themes. It was a very risky and weird game to take on. I was told by some people that it could end my career, especially because it has a name. We're now dealing with an issue this week in games where stuff that's not safe for work or that that looks like it is being delisted from a bunch of platforms and we still chose to commit to making this game. This game's development process is so weird. It was funded by Outer Sloth that it has a Wired oral history on its development on, like, how the pitch came together. It was one bleary night at GDC in 2024. The game was made in a month and a half. And fun fact, it is also part of the reason I'm married now.

[Greg Miller]

Okay, wait, now you gotta tell me more. What's that? What does that mean? Yo, it's the Click Holding. I gotta go to a date with this man.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

I was dating this person who is the first person who ever made me feel completely safe. And it was going really well. And then the contract papers came in to begin development on Click holding. And we were fielding a lot of internal objections and discussions and also discussions with external partners about the risks of this project. So we were walking in a park. Park late at night and I said, hey, person, I'm dating really cool right now. I have a stable job in incomes as stable as you could say for Gabes. But that may change because I'm making a game called Click Holding. And she said, oh. I said, let me explain it real quick. And what ended up happening was me and my neurodivergent panic. I ended up not just telling her the full story and game loop of Click holding, but miming it out in real time in a dark park at night with no one around except for her in the streetlights. And when I was done panting, I was like with. I'm not gonna spoil the ending, but like with the climactic ending of the title and the menace of it, I was like, okay, what do you think? And she looked at me for a moment and she blinked and she. And she looked at a side and she thought. And she said, I think that it's good that you're making this. I think that it's important that people see uncomfortable things. And I was like, oh, you're the one. And we actually got Married months later.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Nice.

[Greg Miller]

Congratulations. That's amazing.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Thank you. I have a soft spot in my heart for this game for a lot of reasons, but that's one of the big ones. Next slide please. After that we had I am your Beast because Click holding was coming so fast on the heels and shared some team members with I am your Beast and complete transparency. That was a bandwidth and like studio capacity lockjam that I oversaw as a leader and that caused crunch on both teams and that was very unfortunate. And I am your Beast ended up having to have, I believe a month long delay at the very end of its development process because of trying to juggle those two projects at the same time. This is where we learned that a small game requires more focus and attention than a big game because you have to make all the pieces work in this compressed time space and sharing that with a bigger project that's especially in a volatile. That's not in a volatile but in a also in its own condensed development state. Will and that was hitting, you know, critical moments of production is going to cause issues. So regardless of both of that, I'm both Click holding and I'm your Beast did manage to launch. The teams did amazing work. Irbeast is a fast paced revenge thriller FPS. It's overwhelmingly positive on Steam. We built this game from beginning to end with a full story campaign, voiced and everything in 10 months even including the delay. So what the team pulled off was deeply impressive there. It performed very well. But regardless, the fact that we were able to, among other things, experiment with different ways of delivering story because in this game our cutscenes were done with kinetic text like you might see on YouTube videos. It was something I'd never really seen before. And it struck me when I saw it on an old MA Bimbam skit as like, oh, you could just use this to tell a story of an entire game. Use voice acting, use audio cues, but deliver the visuals through text appearing on the screen in a very cinematic way. And people ended up really connecting with it to the point that I've now heard from other game developers that they've been able to take this back to their funders and use it as either an example of a different storytelling approach they want to do or to try to pull off similar stuff. Hell yeah.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

I love it too. I was a big fan of Iron your Beast when it came out and that was one of the things that I clocked that like the cutscenes were yeah, the kinetic text that you're talking about. But also that didn't like it wasn't. It didn't feel diminished at all. Like there was quality in the voice acting and the storytelling, which I assume was the voice acting. You. Was that you doing that? Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, those, I mean those quality in it and personality in it that like had me fully engaged with the narrative and even with like the, like it being fully text, like I was all in. And also it got me quicker into the part of the game that I really wanted to be in, which was like the fast paced gameplay and like the, you know, take everything out in like a two minute span or whatever it is. Right. Like, you know, I think that really worked for it, which is, I think a lot of justification for how you're talking about this as far as, you know, being able to get it out the door in 10 months.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Yeah, well, thank you very much. And that game and those decisions were working holistically. We had our budgetary timeline rather than it being like, oh, this game got shortchanged in terms of the resources. We picked the box, we have the box and we made the thing that would be as expressive and stylish within that box as possible. And that is also something that I've seen the discourse of games change around over time of, oh, it should have had a higher budget, should have had a lower, should have had more time. And that is not directly equivalent to a better game. And we've seen a lot of examples of it. But because processes are so disguised in the world of games, those are the only things we have to pull on to say, well, just give it more and the game will get better, hopefully maybe moving on a little bit faster because I know we don't have a whole lot of time. River Heights mall gene splicer 3000 is another game we released during this time. It was an official collaboration with Meow Wolf, the interactive arts installation company. It's a combination of a creature creator and a physics enabled breakout. And I collaborated on this game with Colin McInerney, whose name you're going to hear in just a second. And we don't have a lot of context in space to usually talk about this game because it's not something we can put on Steam or anything else. It's only available at one location in Houston that you have to physically go to. But it's nonetheless something we made and learned from and it was very useful in teaching us because it was another IP game we were making at the same time as our TMNT game. Please move to the next slide. It was like, oh, because we're making these games simultaneously. We're learning lessons we can pull into other projects and learn them faster than if we had two years between every project. Colin McInerney from that collaboration together and we also worked together on Bass Reeves Can't Die, which is chronicled in a YouTube documentary about a game that never came to be. Unfortunately because that was one of the big initial breaks we made. Was also talking about the notable failures and how a Curve can look a lot like a typical indie game, succeeds and manages to come out against all odd story and how that's not the typical one endgames and how it happened to us. Worked with Colin again. He was my co lead on creepy redneck dinosaur mansion 3 and that is a match 3 survival horror metroidvania that very quickly reveals itself to there is no creepy Reddit Dinosaur Mansion 1 or 2. We quickly reveal that to not be a joke, but instead to be a way to dive into the world of game development and into the meta nature of how games get built in this sprawling wild story about this series that doesn't exist. And finally, that was beginning of this year. Oh, you were saying something, Greg.

[Greg Miller]

I was just saying amazing. I love the meta ness of it.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Yeah, that was. And it was inspired by an Outer Wilds concert because it had been canceled twice. We finally found a way to resurrect it thanks to longtime development partners and funders over at Frosty Pop. And I was like, oh, instead of just doing this game and just doing an absurd joke, we can talk about the development of that game itself and what we've experienced as game developers and what the wider industry is experiencing. Because what we're really talking about is a grief process. How do you show grieving from the perspective of the characters inside of the game? And that was a really special thing to explore. And lastly, before we got into co op Kaiju horror cooking, we released Teens Mutant Ninja Turtles Tactical Takedown. This is a turn based beat em up in the world of the TMNT made for less than $300,000 in 18 months. And because we were working at such a small scale, they let us take really wild swings with it that otherwise wouldn't be possible. You play as one turtle at a single time. It's in a world where Splinter and Shredder are already dead and we explore all of the mechanical opportunities and narrative things that come from making the most of the freedom we get from working at a small scale. And that brings us all the way to co op Kaiju horror cooking in the next Slide Our latest project where this game was made in a year. It's our first ever multiplayer game that's been a whole wild big journey. And you can directly see as this being the seventh game that we will have released in two years. We couldn't have made this and made this in a year if we hadn't made 17 games beforehand. If we hadn't made six games beforehand the last two years to get over the logistical issues and complications that arose throughout development as we embarked upon this new journey. And we couldn't have even scoped it to come out at all again if we hadn't all both in our adventures outside of the studio and inside of the studio gained an experience and knowledge of even our own voices. Next slide. So as I introduced at the top of the cast, it is a absurd multiplayer horror game about medieval monks cooking improvised dishes for Kaijus to prevent the apocalypse. This is not overcooked. This is not a place of honor. You are beating a rat over the head with a rolling pin to take its. To take its. To take its skull pulpit in a mortar and pestle, throw some garlic on it and shove it into a Kaiju's mouth so that it won't end the world. And in between every level as we you go through this kind of lethal company phasmophobia peak inspired multiplayer journey, you get to see that monastery actually evolve in a narrative layer over time. Every in game year completed. It's divided into these four chapters. Shows how that monastery and the monks inside of it in this absurd situation grapple with loss and with what it means to hold on to their values and onto each other when the people who used to guide them start to pass away. And that's a game I don't think I would have had the maturity to deliver a story around, especially with any sincerity if I had tried making it a few years ago. And the next slide is a trailer for it for those who want to get a refresher again. It's in an open playtest right now so you can play the entire thing in real time as we come up to our launch next week. It is unfinished. There are things that are broken. There's things in the entire systems we're changing, but we're being open about that to show you the start of a journey and how it's just going to continue when the game comes out for a minimum of two months as we find where this game can go. Next question.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

When you're figuring out what the next project you want to make is, what is the balance of trying to make something that's going to stand out, trying to make something that you guys genuinely want to make, and then also the financials of it. Oftentimes, I think when we talk about greenlighting new games from an audience outside looking in perspective, it's always like, all right, what's the ip? All right, what's the big thing that's going to bring in the players? All right, where's the live service elements and all this shit? Right? But you got. You're talking about putting out like tens of video games and none of these really look to me like, you know, this was the money move, right? Like, even the TMNT game has like a thing to it where I'm like, oh man, that seems kind of like niche and cool and like a very specific audience seems like I think will really like that. Right. But for you, what is the balance of making those decisions on which. What's the next project?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

A lot of it is defined from the top level as the. The studio is the number one thing I'm designing. I'm the studio head. I wear a lot of hats on each game. But the number one thing I'm designing is the studio to produce outcomes. If I want to make games like this or live this type of life, how do I design from the ground up those projects to accommodate that? I know I'm neurodivergent, for example, so being trapped in a single room with a game that I work on for five years is my idea of hell. So I built the studio from its start to be something that I could run while also being in Hellraiser working on games like Borderlands 3 and South park, and that it would allow my collaborators to do the same. And because we are doing these things part time and running the studio part time, that means that also a game like an Airport for Aliens, currently run by Dogs, the first title released under the String Scaffold banner, doesn't determine whether or not our mortgages get paid or whether we can make rent or feed our families. So, yeah, rather than choosing and trying to figure out what the big money play is, as you said from the ground up, I wanted a studio because I'd worked on so many games. I had met people who had changed the games industry with their projects, but they weren't able to look at those projects positively because they hadn't made enough cash or done what they needed it to do. I wanted any game that me and the people I worked with worked on to be worth making. So I'm Choosing smaller packages so I can do weirder, more interesting things and do them simultaneously and really make the life for myself that I want to live as a studio head. And that's one of the things that's been really special to experiences I've gotten to now, talk about my experiences and speak to more people across games as I talk to other studio founders and people who want to run studios. And I'm like, oh, so you're an adult? And they're like, yeah. And I was like, when do you first meet with your team? They're like 9am every day. I'm like, why the fuck do you do that? There's three of you in that room. None of you like to wake up in the morning. Can you build this studio around the life you want to live? And it is sad how often that is revelatory to people because games culture doesn't teach people that it's even. That's that that their own humanity and the way their brain works can be incorporated into the games they make.

[Greg Miller]

Great answer.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Thank you. So with this being what we're making and this journey we're being what we're embarking on, our next games, which we announced last week and this week, hopefully showcase a lot of the culmination of how our ideas and ideals are going to work moving forward. So with. Let's advance two slides, please. Kevin. Our next slate of things. Space Warlord Baby Training Simulator is me returning to the world of space.

[Greg Miller]

What a name.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

That's great.

[Greg Miller]

What a name.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Thank you. I love the world of space. World Organ Training Simulator. It lets me get really angry about the systems that, you know, bind all of us economically and that are fundamentally weird and unfair and really show them out to be problematic by letting you engage with them directly. And in this case, we aren't monsters. Next slide, please. We're doing it by leaning into day trading, where the first game was almost like an auction format and you were satisfying clients. Now you are purely not trading babies. That would be monstrous. Buy and sell baby stocks in the future, speculative markets run upon volatility uncertainty. If you know something's going to do well, it's no longer something you can bet upon. And you will see. That's why in our stock market in the real world, stable products and goods and companies tend to have very stable or low market valuations, where things that are more volatile managed to go way up. And you're like, ah, but that's not a producing a stale product. And it's because that's not the point. It's it's gambling. It's legalized gambling. So you can short a baby because this is stocks. And in the future, what has been. What has incited the creation of this market at all is the creation of these terminals that anyone can go to and see basically a the macro trends that will occur based off of current events. You want to know whether there are wars about to break out on your planet. You go to a future sea terminal. You want to know whether a company is going to fold. You go to a future sea terminal, and it can see that it's made a bunch of markets stabilize. And that made a lot of investors in the universe of our of Space Warlord very, very angry. And so they find the one thing that flies underneath the radar of future sea terminals. Individual human will. And so they're betting on the simulated lifespans and events of babies. You buy baby, you buy baby stocks, you sell baby stocks, you bet on how long they'll live. And you get to really lean into the assumptions and world of make number go up. Doesn't matter what the product is. In another way, that Space Warlord organ training simulator could never really explore alongside that game we're making. Next slide, please. Truck Kun is supporting me from another world. A next slide, please. A arcade driving game runs based where, for those who are not familiar with the anime concept of Isekai, people usually get transported to another world in anime and manga by getting hit by the same nondescript truck. This concept has become a character among the community of otakus known as Truck Kun. Truck Kun sent your character to another world and so you in this game. My wife is a massive weeb. She told me about this one day when we were just on a walk. In an hour, I had a game loop and a story.

[Greg Miller]

Because I was so taken by it, she must. Does she just see. Do you drift away when she starts talking, she's like, oh, you're thinking of a game right now, aren't you? This is the next eight months of our life, isn't it?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

The wonderful thing about our dynamic is that I talked to her in real time. I was like, oh, that's. I think that's a game. And I start like bouncing it off of her real time. And she this isn't a game we're talking about yet, but a game that we've planned to make two years from now is literally in large part inspired by her bouncing off of me as a designer in her own right. Even though she didn't come up, she's just someone who plays Games. She is not herself a doesn't have a background as a professional game designer. So that's. That's been. One really cool thing is I was able to talk in real time through both this idea and bounce it off of her. Her name is Brianne and she's the coolest actually co wrote co op Kaiju Horror cooking with her. But yeah, Truck Kun is supporting me. From another world. You are driving. You have accidentally sent an ambitious girl boss to another world. She got fantasy isekai and that means you're gonna need do a lot more in this case intentional vehicular manslaughter to support her in the other world. She's basically this Tamagotchi. So you are sending her enemies by hitting other people. You are sending her health potions and resources to survive. And it is all accompanied by this bright SEGA Dreamcast era soundtrack and visuals as you bomb down these streets at high speed. In this genre we've again never experienced before. But because we've made so many things in so many different spaces before it you get we have some adjacent experience we can pull upon to make this game and to scope it out in a way that it's actually feasible for us to do in a healthy way at the time and the budget we've got. And speaking of really looking at how the production factors around a game, we from the ground up on the creative level try to help that game have an elevated position and to become more than some of its parts. Like I'm your beast. This next slide is one of the things I'm most excited about for the future. And it's what we announced a couple days ago this week. Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion one re reaptered. What's coolest about this is not just that we get more creepy redneck Dinosaur Mansion. It's that Shroom Scaffold isn't making this game. So Colin McInerney, who was my co lead on Creeper Renegade Dinosaur Mansion 3 and the person I worked with on a couple of games before that, he is starting a studio called Pedal Board Games and at the end of the development cycle for Creepy reddick Dinosaur Mansion 3, he was like, man, I really wish I could keep working with these tools and these systems. But we're coming to an end on this game and the studio moves on to other projects. So that's how it is. And I said, do it, do it, you cow. Do you want to keep working with this stuff? Next slide, please. What something I've wanted to do from the beginning of the studio's history is what I'm calling Project Share. The idea of we make these giant code bases and even like sets of assets, forks and cups and buildings that get used for one game and then just rot away on a hard drive somewhere. So when I started the Studio Train Scaffold, I wanted to originally start it by working off of someone else's foundation, because we're the only artistic medium outside of really music that can remix an existing thing and make a totally distinct and valid artistic expression out of it. So I looked around and I talked to people and there was excitement for the idea, but there was no precedent. And with Colin, this isn't something strange Scaffold intends to do very frequently. It's not something we intend to do with our own worlds very frequently, but doing it at all, and doing it in a way that's public and open, I hope encourages more people to think about sharing resources with each other in radical ways to ensure our survival and to ensure that games that otherwise would never exist get made now. So Colin and his team over at Pedal Board Games are making Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion one a survival horror, Metroidvania, telling the story of what happens after the events of Creepy Reddit Dinosaur Mansion 3, when the publisher who shuttered the studio behind Creepy Reddit Dinosaur Mansion 3 tries to remake the first game with the technology of the third. And you get to see all of the characters deal with remake culture in a game that's going to come out this year in September. Because Colin, someone who worked on the original game, and his wonderful team are building on a game that already exists. It is wild to me that this isn't something that's explored more often. And so the fortunate position we're in making games, multiple games, and doing it in this open relationship with our players is that we get to try these new things, talk about them, and make change where previously there was only closed doors. So creepy running Dinosaur Mansion 1, you can wishlist that one on Steam and I'm real excited for it because I don't have to make it. I love this game.

[Greg Miller]

Your favorite kind of game, the game you don't have to make.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

My question about Creepy redneck dinosaur mansion 3 was going to be about okay, so is that naming scheme confusing for people? This actually makes it a lot better. I love that you make the sequel and it's called Creepy Redneck Dinosaur one Reraptered.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

There's a question. It's a remaster of the first game, the series that doesn't exist. Yeah, that isn't oh, there you go.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Okay, well, that actually answers my question because yeah, Kebabs and Chat was asking, is it a remake or a remaster, but you're confirming it's a remaster of.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

A game that doesn't exist. Yeah, correct. All right, perfect.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Perfect.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

And I mean, that's the presentation. We're making a lot of things. We're assisting people in the way that we can to make more things. You can move to the next slide. Kevin, thank you again so much for your awesome slide shifting. And we're really trying to talk about how we do it so that people can see the good, the bad, the ugly, and understand how we, as artists grow in the process of making these things to make the games that they love, hate and appreciate. And because we're always making something new, even if you don't dig any of the things we're currently working on, there's a very good chance that in a year, because both Space Warlord Baby Trading and Truck Kuhn are coming out within the next year, will have something that you do love, and it's going to be coming dang fast.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Hell yeah. Question. And this feels like a. This feels like a big question, but also you have tons of experience and so I've been based on your presentation. I feel like you might have some answers. How do you transfer this philosophy, this idea of what you're doing with Strange Scaffold, how do you transfer that up to the triple A, Triple A level? Or can you.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

So one thing I was told throughout my career is that the things I was doing and I was talking about sustainable game development or sharing project files and all the. All these different things that made sense to me logically, I was nonetheless told were not possible. And then I started doing them. They're like, well, you can't like sell copies with. Make an impact with it. And then it did. And they're like, well, you can't sell copies of that. And then several of our games did quite well and they were like, well, it doesn't scale up. And then I worked in aaa and it turns out every other industry considers it a failure when you don't create solutions that match your time and your budget. And so if you just take your time and your budget as a creative constraint and work with various talented people to build your solutions around that, it works because it works every other gosh damn place. So at this point, when people tell me that something I'm doing doesn't make sense, I treat that with some skepticism because a lot of the things that aren't changing in games are not changing because we believe they can't be changed, not because they aren't a effective way of bringing someone's next favorite game to life. So yeah, I've at this point done it, which is why I find it hilarious that someone's like, oh, you can't make a AAA game that way. I'm like, what you've just told me if I was an investor is that you don't know how to use money.

[Greg Miller]

All that said and now sitting here and not even blowing smoke, but with so many successes behind you and under your belt, what was it like to take those first at bats? You know what I mean? I think now we sit here, we talk about co op, Kaiju, horror, cooking and then Truck Kuhn is supporting me like these titles that I'm sure any other publisher, you know what I mean, would be like, this is too long, people will be confused and you're just like fuck it here, like now it makes sense. But in the beginning to start that way and go against what so many would think is the common knowledge of oh, you don't make your title like that. You don't do. You don't make games this quickly. How did you get the confidence to be like, no, fuck you, I do do it this way and this is going to work.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

At first it wasn't confidence. A lot of it was waiting for the other shoe to drop. And to be honest, that feeling hasn't fully gone away. I do not have perfect knowledge. We still, as I was talking about through the entire presentation, we make mistakes, we hopefully just learn from them as best we can before we make the next series. And I think that the first few at bats were really defined by feeling like I had missed something and trying to build into my life structures of survival for when I, when everything inevitably fell apart. And when I realized that the small business I was running and trying to run as a small business that was, you know, sustainable as someone who didn't grow up with money and didn't have access to that those types of resources really or connections or pre existing networks, I was like, oh okay, everything didn't fall apart. Let me continue to try to make the smartest move I can. So it was, it was scary and I did receive a lot of feedback post positive and negative coming to now. But I think the attitude is very long term and also it comes with a lot of grace for the teams that don't work that way either because they can't or because the things that strange scaffold does straight up, wouldn't work for a lot of other studios, just like a lot of the things that other studios make wouldn't work for us. And that's part of why what I'm trying to do is not say, this is the way you make games or make them ethically, quote unquote, or make them in a way that really gives players what they need. It is different ways that you make games, produce different types of games that satisfy players and bring them things in different ways. What we need to be talking about, especially in a time where the games industry is on fire, is making sure that what you say you want to make for players matches what you're actually building. And this is one thing that I think games is criminally bad at, because you'll hear about a big new live service, AAA game, and it takes them three months to make an update in a time where Fortnite makes the update weekly. And it's like, well, hey, you said you want to deliver players new experiences every week. You literally don't have a thing that matches that intent. I want to make things that match intent. And I early on tried to do that best as I could, had successes, had failures. And I have feel like I have more knowledge now to do that more intentionally and to tell people about the specific levers we're pulling to do it and hopefully give them the. The same sense of empowerment to make those calls, make those decisions, or advocate for themselves and say, the thing you're having me make or the way you're having me make it straight up, does not match the game that our players deserve and the processes that we will need to take to make it.

[Greg Miller]

Hell yeah.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Yeah. Another question I got. You know, a few months ago we had on Adam Boys, who he just started up a company called Vivrado.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Yes.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Yeah, Vivrado.

[Greg Miller]

Right.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

And one of the things that they did was print out like a 52 deck of cards, and on each of the cards they had like a, like a problem within the games industry. And like, you know, the whole, you know, construction of that company is trying to help companies figure out how to navigate these issues and like, you know, figure out how to make games. And what you mentioned is a volatile video games industry right now. Right. It feels like everything's on fire for you. Like, what are some of the biggest sins you're seeing across game development, both on the indie level and the triple A level?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

I think some of the biggest ones is that there is, as I said, mismatch structures with the outcomes that they're supposed to be producing. I think one of the biggest ones is determining that game entire types of games as not being worth making. So something we did run into what with a few of our projects and even still run into now is well that's too cheap or that's too fast to be worth making. And it's like okay, but if you look at Hollywood, a three million dollar game, a three million dollar movie operates different than a 300 million dollar movie and both can coexist. And it you just change the numbers and the structure to accommodate either 1. The 3 million dollar movie isn't worth, isn't not worth making. It's just different. And in fact it gives you the opportunity to do things business wise and like creatively that you otherwise could not do with a $300 million movie that needs to be, that needs to hit the four quadrant audience and do at least 100 million in China. And I would talk to business types and games about this and their entire and their eyes would glaze over. I talked to creative types and games and they would think that I had sold out to the dark forces of capitalism. And what it means is that players are invisibly being robbed of choice. The number of really cool games that I know, especially at the budget that they're say pitched at could become someone's next favorite game. Could keep the studio alive for one or two or three games to come if it was just given a chance. Part of the reason we are where we are now with so many closures and everything, even on the indie side is because developers were literally told you're giving us a $300,000 pitch. $300,000 is a decent amount of money too. If you had $300,000 in your bank account tomorrow, you'd feel pretty good about it. But being told well that's not enough. Make a $3 million game and then being abandoned midway through that process or they release a $3 million game, they have an entire team of like say 20, 30 people that need another $3 million game or a $10 million game to continue operations and then having the rug pulled out underneath them by the wider investors, platforms and publishers of this industry. I think that is something that players usually don't have context to get upset about. And that as a developer who is also a player, I'm constantly playing and experiencing new games and thinking about video games. It tears me up because I will see people in forums or in the kind of funny chat being like man, I love stealth games or I really wish this type of weird arcade thing existed. It's like, ooh, I saw a pitch deck for that six months ago and no one considered it worth making or was willing to have a conversation about what you would change in its production to make that game still worth making and end up in someone's Steam library. So I think mismatch structures, greed, all the invisibly rising number of things a game developer has to do on a given project is all valid things. But I think investors, publishers and platforms invisibly robbing players of choice and players not having the context in order to advocate for themselves or the developers that make them their games is where a lot of those problems come to rest and why they also fail to get addressed. Because with the data that we have as players, we can get upset about frame rate or about launch stability, but we can't say, well you fired the writer that made my favorite moments in the previous game and bring that person back in the same way that maybe you'll have that type of thing happen in music or in Hollywood.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

What are some video game developers or publishers that you think are doing it right?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

I think some people who are really doing it right are Landfall games. They have, they have structure, they may peak, they made content warning. There's a lot of discussion about them right now, but I think one of the things to take away from their they're also fairly open approach to talking about what the games, what games they make and how they make them is they built their entire structure around the types of games they want to make and the way that they want to make them. They are living individual, self actualized lives. Frosty Pop, who we've worked with frequently, who is funding the next two strange scaffold games and stepped in to really save the studio when no one else would fund us. El Paso elsewhere looked like it would be our last game. I was doing freelance to for us for a period of time. My freelance over time was paying everyone who was working at the studio, so I was grinding myself into the dust to just get the cash to stay open and to finish what would be our last game and when canceling projects in the process, which is how I'm your beast first got canceled, how creepy rotic dinosaur mansion 3 got canceled for the second time, etc. I was telling Faisal, who I was freelancing with at the time, about the next game I'd make after El Paso and how it would be so small that no one could stop me from making a game again and how I was excited by it and that nonetheless because of its subject material and because it was so small, no one would fund it. And Faisal said I would. And he, since, you know, backed us in a multi project deal that we've now gone beyond and continue to work together because we work together so well and his studio is set up. We are the first people that we've ever met who worked like each other in games. He makes his games on time and on budget and stylishly and defines the entire scope and what the project can do by that. I have massive respect for him as a man and I'm obviously immensely grateful for how he stepped up for me and for the people that I work with. I think one last developer I would call out in particular who's doing some really interesting things in this time is New Blood. Because they work diametrically different from both me and from say, the folks at Landfall. Their entire thing is games that take as long as they need to to make them. And they're very transparent about. If we hadn't had Dusk be a success and Ultra Kill be a success, we couldn't take this time. And now that we do, here's our entire strategy that we have built to be of having had several hit games. How do we keep making hit games? They also, they're not a traditional publisher. They basically created a collective where they hire people in and they all work on each other's games as well as assist each other with the distribution of those games. And their entire thing is perfectionism. Gloomwood has been in development for a long time and it will continue to be until they feel they have it right and they build community for that game as they build it in the way that fits what the community needs from it and wants from it and what the developers want to make and holistic, cohesive, considerate ways to think through making a game. They don't guarantee your success, but they're the closest thing to giving you a shot. And I think New Blood, Landfall, Frosty Pop are some of the people who, even when they do get sung, it usually isn't celebrated for this reason. They're celebrated from some other reason that is that can be drawn back to their processes. Which is why I want to celebrate those processes and talk about how they're cool.

[Greg Miller]

And we love you doing that. Bless. Any other questions?

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

I got one last question. One last question. One of the things I really enjoyed hearing you talk about, I was listening to post games from Chris Plant and you talked about processes, right? And I think the thing that stuck out to me was it being Less so about can you make a great game and can you, more so can you produce an ecosystem that creates great games? Do you think that we're gonna see I guess like a bounce back from the fire that we're in, right in the video games industry, do you think we're gonna see more studios figure out how to get to that place where now we're an ecosystem that produces great games as opposed to being like all right, you know, we're over budget, we delayed hell, shucks, we tried, we tried.

[Greg Miller]

Going to hell and now we put.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

Out a game and we're getting layoffs anyway or the studios closed down anyway. Like do you think we're gonna see more and more studios get to that place where they become these good ecosystems?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

I don't know is the simplest way I can answer that. Because the thing that it requires is setting a mark and setting a personal standard and then sticking to it, right? So if you're going to make say mid sized games, what you're really committing to in making a relationship with your players in terms of what you're promising them is that we will make games that are flawed, yes, but that are do something really interesting and they do it at a higher budget scale that lets them either pull off some new graphical stuff or pull in systems that they otherwise couldn't operate under and utilize in their gameplay loop. And the thing that it would require if you did well enough to survive in that model is to keep doing that. It's to believe in something and keep doing it. And this is where I'd say like kinda funny is very special and interestingly enough, a bit of a model for what it takes to have the games ecosystem become better. Because upon finding success, Greg did not try to immediately buy, at least to my knowledge, Warner Brothers Discovery from David Zaslav. You did not escalate.

[Greg Miller]

They won't return my emails. They won't return my emails.

[Blessing Adioye Jr.]

I'm pretty sure Greg's not trying to.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Do that but like buying an entire TV channel and saying actually we're going to hit 3 million kind of funny subscribers by 2026 and bringing in a board and a VC funding, you've set your flag and what you care about kind of funny doing and accomplishing in the lives that people have while they make it. When you do grow, it's in very considerate and intelligent and it's very intentional. Considerate and intelligent I would say ways. And if the thing does really well, that just gives you more time to do that thing and more space to solve Problems. When problems arise, and in games proper, or rather games development proper, the idea of committing to a strategy that way is still such a embryonic conversation. It is perceived that when you succeed with a $10,000 game, you will make $1 million game next. That is what people tried to push us into at Shrink Scaffold for years. And I thank God now that none of those things panned out because we did pitch it right. It seemed like the curve and even, like, what I would want is to eventually have a studio that worked that way and a bunch of my peers who got those deals now have closed studios or have had to lay off a bunch of people. And that isn't to say that we did anything that was, quote, unquote, better than them or even worse than them. It's just we didn't get to a scale where we could be destroyed and have the rug pulled out from underneath us. I'm very thankful for that in hindsight. And that is now that we have this pocket of safety, I'm trying to pull a kind of funny and say, this is where we plant our flag. This is what we do. We're going to have successes, we're going to have failures, but if we keep relating to players in this way, one thing I do know from so much experience is that we'll be able to keep making really, really special things and taking care of people as we do it.

[Greg Miller]

That's such a great place to end it. But I have one more question, and it's just when you're talking about doing that and stay in that space and make it, how does the TM&T thing happen? Because that was the cool. You know, because I think about you and I think about, like, Mike Bithell and doing Tron and like, hey, here are smaller creators, smaller devs that are taking on ip. That could be the biggest thing in the world in terms of game size and Triple A's bloat. But can also be this vision, like, did they come to you? Did you go to them? Were they looking for weird ideas? Like, how does that happen? And was there pushback from you or the people you collaborate with? Of, like, whoa, is this what we do? Because we want to go make the weird. We're sacrificing animals to the Kaiju. But also there's this deep story about loss tied up in it.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Yeah, that was really interesting. I can't say everyone was really, really stoked to get tmnt. There was no one going like, ah, damn it, I get to make. I get to Make Donatello dialogue. No one said that or I have to make Donatello dialogue. But for tmnt, that one was really cool. And what I can put it as a contrast to is I don't think I've really talked about this publicly. I was supposed to be the creative director of a RoboCop game. MGM, who at least at the time owned the rights, came to me or I ran into them and they were deeply excited about working with Strange Scaffold. This was much earlier in our history. I had a pitch that they, that they loved. I brought in a funder. The funder was locked in. And the thing that was haunting me as I was looking down what could have been, you know, my blast off point, the way I thought of it was that the numbers and the expectations and the structure didn't add up. MGM is cool, the funder was cool. But the type of game that we were making, the expectations that would be on it and the production structures around it, I was just looking at the numbers and the time and the business arrangement and I said, this doesn't work. And so I made the really hard decision at the time, looking at like RoboCop, one of my favorite series, and said I told my funder that we should back out. And we did. And RoboCop ended up having. My pitch was called RoboCop Blind City and RoboCop Rogue City ended up coming out like five years later. And it's such a good.

[Greg Miller]

Their asses.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

No, no, no, no. I just thought it was funny that we both use City. I'm not suggesting any theft or anything there.

[Greg Miller]

Nefariousness, yes.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

No nefariousness there. But it was also RoboCop Robotic City is one of the few games I've beaten in years. It's so good. Please, please buy it and support those developers. They're amazing. But make. But pitching RoboCop Blind City, having a path to making it and then saying no to it felt like a big mistake for a while, like a very scary thing to do. And then. But when the door opened, I met this guy who's since been laid off at Paramount. He was our advocate over there, Doug Rosen. He was SVP of games and new media. I believe he really wanted to work together on something and we couldn't find the right thing. And ultimately what I literally ended up doing on yet another call because he was like, let's get on another call. I really want to work together is I was scrolling through the things that we were working on or that we had technology basis for and then Literally scrolling in the screen share also through their list of ip and they, as a multinational conglomerate have so many things that they own. I landed on the TMNT page and we were making a game called Teens Demon Slayer Society that was a turn based character action game. And I just kind of matched them together on the screen and I said, what if we did a beat em up version of this for the Turtles? And his entire face lit up and he said, yes, let's do it. And what followed was not just saying let's do it. I came back to Paramount with an entire production structure and a business structure and said the only way this will work and the only way Strange Scaffold will be able to produce this game. Knowledge I was able to have built up by, at that time, I think we had shipped like 12, 14 games, was I know enough about myself and my team and what is needed for us to produce a game that we cannot handle a big IP without these structures around it and this limitation on scope and this inherent couching of expectations on what the game can and should be, given that we're working at a smaller scale. And to their credit, things that I've been trying to say to even indie publishers for years, cbs, Viacom, the multinational conglomerate just got. And so I came in with, with a business structure and with a production structure alongside the game pitch. They agreed to it and we were able to produce the game that we said because among other things, despite having an overwhelming differential in terms of the power dynamic with us, they respected the lines that we had set and they understood and showed with their actions, as I understood, we will not get this game from this team unless they're able to do these things, unless they're able to limit the scope to work at this scale, to not be forced to grow beyond it or build a roguelike mode or something. And now that game exists and people like it and we're excited to see it go other places. And we may or may not have news to share about that later. In the summer of Strange Scaffold, Jordan.

[Greg Miller]

Midler's ears are burning. These are all gonna be VG stories.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Tomorrow, but nothing to confirm, but I can say we're very excited to explore those things. And yeah, like that was tmnt. TMNT was the second at bat that was taken with ip and it was the one we were able to take because it was built around a structure designed to support it. And so even if we never do IP again, I have a blueprint for understanding that world. And since I since worked on other IP games and even now before I worked on TMNT I'd worked on a different Paramount game which was South Park Snow Day. All of those things tied into allowing that game to be possible. Which is why one of the worst things that has occurred in games is that compared to early FromSoft two games a year we have the most talented people in the world locked in a room making a Last of Us remaster for four years but and they gain no experience anywhere else for their next project for what could be the thing that blows players minds next. And while I love Last of Us and its remasters, that is a loss for gaming on an objective level.

[Greg Miller]

Hear hear. Our final word is a super chat from the one, the only Langley M. Neely who writes in and says I normally think the phrase is pretentious, but Xalivir is an actual thought leader in gaming. His philosophy and way of working is needed for this industry. Another here here.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Thank you.

[Greg Miller]

Zolivir Nelson Jr. Thank you so much for hanging out with us today. Where can people keep up with you and what's the best thing they can do to help Strange Scaffold?

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Best thing you can do to help Strange Scaffold is we actually relaunched our Patreon around our new goals and process. One of the tier rewards is we will actually this was another very scary threshold to consider. We're going to be sending out our design documents. We will literally send out our scripts and the documents we use to make the game so that you can see the literal documents and production comments that were made in bringing it to life. So you can find us at patreon.com Strange Scaffold you can play and leave feedback for and wish list and tell your friends about Co Op Kaiju Horror cooking. It's a multiplayer game so we will need players. It comes out July 29th and right now you can play it in the open play test and tell us what you think and see that journey in real time. You can wish list Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion one Reraftered and really help boost pedal board games in that team as they begin. This is a I think their first commercial release as a new distinct team. Several of them had been laid off or hadn't received opportunities in games at all. I'd love to have kind of funny show up for them if that seems interesting to y'. All. So those are the three. Those are the three big things I can say outside of following outside of following us at Strange Scaffold everywhere. And if you want to follow me specifically as I continue to play through 50 cent blood on the sand.

[Greg Miller]

You're doing God's work.

[Zolivier Nelson Jr.]

Yeah, you can find me Ritnelson, Writ Nelson all the places.

[Greg Miller]

Well, thank you so much for your time and again rolling with the punches today. Thank you. Of course everyone watching, listening, whatever. Thank you for your support. Remember the Kind of Funny Games cast is live each and every weekday after Kind of Funny Games Daily YouTube.com kindafunnygames Twitch TV Kinda FunnyGames podcast services around the globe. No matter where you get the show, please consider picking up a membership. You could grab it over on patreon.com kindafunny where you could also get stranger scaffold. Get a twofer right there as you get in there. You can get our membership Also on Twitch TV kind no no no. YouTube.com kindafunnygames Apple and Spotify no bucks tossed away like subscribe share all that jazz. If you're watching live right now, of course, get ready for the killing floor 3 stream. If not, go check that out. We put all our streams up on YouTube later. For now though, we'll say until next time, it's been our pleasure to serve you.